Curiosity
by Kei Tree
Summary: Max's thoughts on how to live, death, and, well, curiosity... Please rr!


Curiosity...  
  
*may have killed the cat; more likely   
the cat was just unlucky, or else curious   
to see what death was like, having no cause   
to go on licking paws, or fathering   
litter on litter of kittens, predictably.*  
  
It took me forever to understand humans, and even now I still get   
baffled sometimes. I mean they look at the world so, so skewed.   
Everything is supposed to be normal and complacent and dull!   
Happiness is found in the white picket fences of well off suburbia,   
or a marriage with two point five children, even in post Pulse   
America.  
  
Not to get me wrong... I'm not one to take life's simple pleasures   
lightly. Good friends, cold drinks on a hot summer day... My   
childhood wasn't exactly Sunday ballgames and Saturday morning   
cartoons you know. I know a good thing when I've got it. You think   
you've seen your share of pain? I was born to pain.   
  
But what's the point of life if you don't live? I used to get so   
frustrated and feel so damn resentful sometimes, when I huddled in   
damp boxes in the back of alleys. I grew up running from my birth,   
alone, and afraid. I was a refugee but I wasn't fleeing from any   
country but my own and it used to astound me that humans, that people,   
could be so blind as to what they had! To the opportunities available   
to them that they just didn't see.  
  
*Nevertheless, to be curious   
is dangerous enough. To distrust   
what is always said, what seems,   
to ask old questions, interfere in dreams,   
leave home, smell rats, have hunches   
do not endear cats to those doggy circles   
where well-smelt baskets, suitable wives, good lunches   
are the order of things, and where prevails   
much wagging of incurious heads and tails.*   
  
Maybe that's why trouble seems to follow me like a bloodhound that's   
caught the scent of its quarry. Why, even now, I never seem to fit   
in.   
  
Because I don't want my life to mean nothing. What an awful waste...   
to survive all I have only to flinch when it comes to making something   
out of my life. Training tells me to slink into the uncaring   
anonymity of the rest of the world but instinct, god, my very blood,   
rebels at the thought. I'm no one particularly special, not in my own   
mind, but dammit, I'm someone different. We all are, if we bother   
looking hard enough, transgenic, human, same and blessedly different   
in the end.  
  
I'm never going to win any popularity contests, though beauty contests   
may not be out of reach thanks to my genes... I seem to get shot at   
wherever I go, not just for being who I am, but for caring who others   
are. I care about people, their lives, their deaths. I stick my   
genetically engineered nose where it doesn't belong and sometimes I   
get burned.   
  
But you know what? That's a part of life and I'm trying damn hard to   
live mine to the best of my limited capabilities.   
  
*Face it. Curiosity   
will not cause us to die-   
only lack of it will.   
Never to want to see   
the other side of the hill   
or that improbable country   
where living is an idyll   
(although a probably hell)   
would kill us all.   
Only the curious   
have, if they live, a tale   
worth telling at all.*   
  
Don't you every get tired of living without color, or taste, or   
texture? I tried to deny myself a hundred times, a thousand, but in   
the end I finally figured it out. I don't want to die, but I won't   
sacrifice life at the expense of death.   
  
I'm not one for tentativeness, or timidity. I didn't fight as hard   
as I did just to slink in shadows, hoping to avoid the sun, dodging   
the adventure. So what if I never live to see my hair turn gray? To   
feel my joints swell, or my body thicken? What would be the use of   
telling my grandchildren stories if the stories aren't worth telling?   
  
*Dogs say cats love too much, are irresponsible,   
are changeable, marry too many wives,   
desert their children, chill all dinner tables   
with tales of their nine lives.   
Well, they are lucky. Let them be   
nine-lived and contradictory,   
curious enough to change, prepared to pay   
the cat price, which is to die   
and die again and again,   
each time with no less pain.   
A cat minority of one   
is all that can be counted on   
to tell the truth. And what cats have to tell   
on each return from hell   
is this: that dying is what the living do,   
that dying is what the loving do,   
and that dead dogs are those who do not know   
that dying is what, to live, each has to do.*  
  
Its called a cycle for a reason people. You can't escape it, and you   
can't run from it. We're bound, human, transgenic, and tit mouse,   
to the circle of life and death and that gray area in-between. So   
face it.  
  
Face your fears and ignore the whispers and the taunts of those   
content with their suburbia and fences and two point five children.   
I'm telling you all the truth, one you don't want to realize when   
you're ninety...  
  
Live like there's no tomorrow and if there is, then celebrate! Dodge   
the bullets and do what you can with what you've been given.   
Curiosity didn't kill the cat and even if it did, then so what? Mourn   
the cat's passing and then wonder 'Where is it now?' Wonder and know   
that you'll find out soon, we all will, but only the curious have a   
chance to be ready for it.   
  
  
  
  
AN: Curiosity- by Alastair Reid, one of my favorite poems. See,   
Literature books are good for something after all, not that I was reading   
the actual assignment... *snickers* Anyway, just felt it fit. You know,   
cat, curiosity, cat DNA...  
  
OH! I do want to write a Max/Alec fic but needed some info... What was   
the name of White's kid? And did he go stay with his aunt? And does anyone   
know a *detailed* page for episode guides? Thanks ya'll! 


End file.
